This is awesome Josh!
Really, I think these moments are why I am spending most of my free time here instead of on the Star Citizen forums hehe! You're sharing all these little events with us and that's just great.

@Gazz: again we have different feelings about X3: manual docking has maybe gone wrong just once ever, and that was about the first time. It's darn easy, fast, and the good kind of fun: there's just no comparison to flying your ship actually inside a tiny hole that just before looks way too small.
Of course, after while you're glad for the docking computer insta-dock, but mostly just when you're 'grinding'.

@Josh again: I wonder if the library you found can be used to make hollow asteroids with multiple corridors hehe... would definitely be great. If we can figure something worthwhile to put inside... maybe a hidden pirate base, or some superior mining area in others.

Godwin wrote:@Josh again: I wonder if the library you found can be used to make hollow asteroids with multiple corridors hehe... would definitely be great. If we can figure something worthwhile to put inside... maybe a hidden pirate base, or some superior mining area in others.

Instant thought is of star wars: the empire strikes back and hiding in an asteroid.... which would be awesome.

Godwin wrote:@Gazz: again we have different feelings about X3: manual docking has maybe gone wrong just once ever, and that was about the first time. It's darn easy, fast, and the good kind of fun

I'm not talking about feelings or impressions. There are ship / station combos that are guaranteed to destroy your ship if you dock / undock manually.
Originally, when all you could fly was a glorified fighter, manual docking worked perfectly fine.

Like bombing an airstrip? Yeah, that would be cool. A surgical strike as it were. Presumably though an able captain wouldn't have his fighters just sitting about in the dock. And if it wasn't the only wing, and you had shot your way through those ships in space he would already have launched the others. So even if you could I just don't see how it would work logically. Now if you snuck in pretending to be friendly and then opened fire.....But then the space dock doors would be closed and the military aren't just going to let anyone dock with their carrier now are they?

I doubt the typical carrier would have its fighters sitting around exposed to vacuum; at least it would make maintenance and pre-flight ops easier to have a pressurised flight deck separate from the landing deck, like they have on the battlestars in BSG.

Sorry if you guys covered this already i read the first page and then just skipped all the others and read the sixth.
There are more benefits to having carrier style docking than just gameplay coolness.
There is a very real performance benefit as well, depending on the number of ships in any given system.

Say your flying around in a capital ship and have a bunch of fighters/ corvettes/ whatever escorting you. They are not internally docked and just fly around with you in a sort of giant cloud.

This can cause a massive amount of traffic problems. ships crashing into you or each other / NPCs, you'd cause a space traffic jam wherever you crossed/ used a path that the AI likes to take. If you entered a system that's densely populated with NPCs it would be utter chaos!

It also means your computer has to work harder to render all of your escorts all the time, instead of them being tucked safely in a bay as 1s and 0s

Im sure you guys have covered the cool things you could do with a carrier system so Im not going to mention that.

Carrier system for limit theory!
Because no one likes their CPU to catch fire.

Having a swarm of fighters around a ship is unlikely because of ship limits. However there has been some interesting discussion about drone swarms which may make something like what you described possible.

PS: Josh, I love the amount of communication you have with those in this thread. It is amazing to see how quickly you could code new content. I do hope we see this suff in the final product.